A spoiler-free recommendation for a morally tense film.
Through the frames of To a Land Unknown, viewers gain insight into a fictional story that portrays the hopeless situation of victims trapped in a religious-political conflict. More specifically, it sheds light on those who, in search of a peaceful future, continue their escape from temporary camps toward Europe.
At the heart of the film are two young Palestinian Arab cousins, whose desperate actions unfold through a chain of causes and consequences. It’s about their journey, from a Lebanese refugee camp to Athens, and from there, into the unknown.
The creators of the film maintain a muted tension throughout, drawing on the characters’ vulnerable complexities—even as their actions drift far from societal norms, into illegality. The Danish-Palestinian director, Mahdi Fleifel, brings a powerful layer of authenticity to the film through personal experience—having spent part of his youth in a Lebanese refugee camp before eventually making his way to Denmark.
In the film’s central moral scene, it is Reda—the more vulnerable of the two Palestinian boys—who delivers the key line: “When people are locked together in a small place for too long, they turn into dogs and begin attacking each other. They become animalistic. They lose all their values, upbringing, and morals.” With this single sentence, the writers—Mahdi Fleifel, Fyzal Boulifa, and Jason McColgan—subtly twist the film’s moral thread and invite critical reflection. The contrast between the characters’ gentle features and their starkly portrayed human flaws becomes all the more striking.
What does this film—screened at Cannes last year and recently released in Hungarian cinemas—remind us of? With some stretch, it might bring to mind La Haine (1995), Hate, though with one crucial difference: in To a Land Unknown, there is no hatred, no malice—only loss and hopelessness. Escape, and the quiet burden of sustaining family illusions and expectations. It lacks the raw edge of Vincent Cassel’s iconic performance, but like La Haine, it too sends out a shout—a stark, unfiltered call from the edges of society, demanding to be heard and understood.
